BitTorrent Creator Aims to Kill Bitcoin with the Green Cryptocurrency “Chia”
Known for inventing torrenting (BitTorrent) in the early noughties, Bram Cohen might also end up getting famous for an entirely different thing – solving the electricity wastage problem of bitcoin.
Cohen’s newest creation, a cryptocurrency known as Chia which bills itself as ‘green money for a digital world’, is the very antithesis of bitcoin. Unlike bitcoin which uses the electricity-guzzling proof-of-work consensus mechanism, the chia cryptocurrency uses proof-of-space where the mining process uses the hard disk space.
Speaking to Breaker magazine Cohen stated that hard disk space is readily and widely available and most of the time unutilized:
The idea is that you’re leveraging this resource of storage capacity, and people already have ludicrous amounts of excess storage on their laptops, and other places, which is just not being utilized. There is so much of that already that it should eventually reach the point where if you were buying new hard drives for the purpose of farming, it would lose you money.
